The present invention generally relates to a nanodisplacement producing apparatus. More specifically, the present invention concerns a nanodisplacement producing apparatus suitable for any of fine pattern producing apparatuses and measuring apparatuses, equipped with fine moving mechanisms of STM (Scanning Tunneling Microscopy), electron beam lithography apparatus, and scanning electron microscope and so on.
In the conventional fine pattern producing/monitoring apparatus, the fine patterns are produced/monitored by employing the fine moving mechanism constructed of the piezoelectric elements. This conventional technique is described in "Introduction to Scanning Tunneling Microscopy" written by C. Julian Chen, Oxford University Press, 1993, FIG. 1.1. In accordance with this prior art, the three-axial piezo-electric transducers so-called as a "tripot" are used to drive the probe of STM (scanning tunneling microscope). Since such a measuring mechanism for measuring the expansion dimensions of the piezoelectric transducers in resolution lower than 1 nanometer is not assembled in this STM apparatus, no positioning control of the probe within the plane parallel to the sample in the precision smaller than 1 nanometer is carried out, In other words, drifts and the like caused by thermal expansion of the piezoelectric transducers are not controlled. Furthermore, there is no means for realizing by a single hardware, a so-called "zooming mechanism" for monitoring/controlling the distance over several tens of micrometers at high precision.
Also, with respect to the sensitivity for the variations in the resonator lengths occurred in operations of the optical parametric oscillator, the publication (written by T. Debuisschert et al., "QUANTUM OPTICS" volume 1, pages 3 to 9, 1989) describes that when the length of a resonator is changed from 2 nm to 3 nm, the oscillation of the resonator would be stopped. However, this publication considers the control of the resonator length only in view of stabilization of the output strengths of this optical parametric oscillator, but does not pay any attention to such a view point, i.e., effectiveness of the optical parametric oscillator functioning as a nanodisplacement element by utilizing the variation in the resonator lengths.